8-2012. with appreciative acknowledgement for film maker/photographer Shu Zhu and models Fay Leshner and Yaku Quillakasha for collaborating on spring/ summer 2013 preview video of spirals into movement

” Just as the great oceans has but one taste, the taste of salt, so too this Dhamma has but one taste, the taste of freedom.” The Buddha/Udana 56

January 17, 2011

I have decided to let the above quote freely enter into this mind like how rivers find their way into the ocean without having to question where one starts and the other ends. Just flowing, ungraspable yet still..........The freedom that the Dhamma reveals is intrinsically apart of experience just like salt is to the ocean. The beauty of this truth is that we can practice it and taste for ourselves the meaning behind these words and a felt sense of freedom in being human. Though I longed for freedom, it seems I’m more familiar with oppression in countless names and forms; even more raw is the residency of these energies in my body and mind. Oppression isn’t limited to unpleasant states such as fear or depression but also the blah of boredom to even the ecstatic highs. Within these movements of experiences lies a stillness that reveals the transparent, changing nature of all phenomena to ebb and flow like ocean waves or the fluid immediacy of what we call, “the breath”. Thereby, this freedom in stillness isn’t a movement towards or away but intimately centered in the changing flow of life. With this understanding, we are free to connect with being human in all its names and forms without being oppress by the reactivity of clinging, aversion and misunderstanding. This doesn’t mean that problems in life vanish; instead, there’s less fear and more ease which awakens a primal confidence to reentered the ocean of our lives and taste the salty freedom that is never apart but always present, timeless and utterly still............